And she was there. He was aware of her at once, though she was only a slender additional shadow pressed close within the deep doorway of the cell. He heard the key grating ineffectively in the wards of the lock it did not fit, and her vexed, angry breathing as she wrestled to make it enter where it would not go. He heard her stamp her foot in frustrated rage, and grit her teeth, too intent to become aware of his approach until he reached an arm to put her aside, quite gently.
“No use, child!” he said. “Let me!”
She uttered a muted cry of despair, and plucked herself furiously backward out of his grasp. There was no sound from within the cell, though the prisoner’s little lamp was lighted, its faint glow showed at the high, barred window.
“Wait, now, wait!” said Cadfael. “You have a message to deliver here, and so have I. Let’s be about it.” He stooped to pick up the wrong key, which had been jerked out of the lock and out of her hand when she started away. “Come, and I’ll let you in.”
The right key turned sweetly in the heavy lock, and Cadfael opened the door. Tutilo was standing fronting them, erect and rigid, his face a narrow, pale flame, his amber eyes wide and wild. He had known nothing of her plans, he did not know now what to expect, why this confining door should ever have been opened now, at this end of the day, after all permitted visits were over.
“Say what you came to say to him,” said Cadfael. “But briefly. Waste no time, for I have none to waste, and neither has he.”
Daalny stood tense and at a loss far one moment, before she flung herself bodily into the open doorway, as though she feared the door might be slammed again before she could prevent, though Cadfael made no move. Tutilo stood staring in bewilderment from one of them to the other, without understanding, almost without recognition.
“Tutilo,” she said, low-voiced and urgent, “come away now. Through the wicket here, and you’re free. No one will see you, once outside the walls. They’re all at Compline. Go, quickly, while there’s time. Go west into Wales. Don’t wait here to be made a scapegoat, go, now... quickly!”
Tutilo came to life with a shudder and a start, golden flames kindling in his eyes. “Free? What have you done? Daalny, they’ll only turn on you...” He turned to stare at Cadfael, braced and quivering, unsure whether this was friend or enemy facing him. “I do not understand!”
“That is what she came to say to you,” said Cadfael. “I have a message for you, too. Sulien Blount is here with a horse for you, and begs that you will come to his mother, now, at once, for the Lady Donata is dying, and is asking to see you again, and hear you, before she dies.”
Tutilo stiffened into marble stillness. The yellow flames darkened and softened into the pure glow of a steady fire. His lips moved, saying her name silently: “Donata?”
“Go, now!” Daalny ordered, past anger now that the contest was joined and could not be evaded. “I have dared this for you, how dare you now cast it in my face? Go, while there’s time. He is one and we are two. He cannot prevent!”
“I would not prevent,” said Cadfael. “The choice is his to make.”
“Dying?” said Tutilo, finding a voice clear, quiet and grieving. “Truly, she is dying?”
“And asking for you,” said Cadfael. “As you said she did two nights ago. But tonight it is true, and tonight will be the last time.”
“You have heard,” said Daalny, smouldering but still. “The door is open. He says he will not prevent. Choose, then! I have done.”
Tutilo did not seem to hear her. “I used her!” he said, lamentably shaken. And to Cadfael he said doubtfully: “And Herluin lets me go?”
“Not Herluin, but the abbot lets you go. On your honour to return, and under escort.”
Tutilo took Daalny suddenly between his hands, with grieving gentleness, and moved her aside from the doorway. He raised a hand with abrupt, convulsive passion and stroked her cheek, long fingers smoothing eloquently from temple to chin in a gesture of helpless apology.
“She wants me,” he said softly. “I must go to her.”
Chapter Eight
DAALNY HAD DISCARDED at once her anger and her pleading as soon as the choice was made, and made in such a fashion that she knew it could not be changed. She followed to the corner of the schoolroom, and there stood watching in silence as Tutilo mounted, and the little cavalcade filed out at the gate and turned along the Foregate. The broader track from the Horse Fair was better for riding; he would not have to pass by on the narrow path where he had stumbled over Aldhelm’s body.
The bell for Compline rang, the time she had set herself for hounding him out at the wicket, into a world he was, perhaps, already beginning to regret surrendering, but which he might have found none too hospitable to a runaway Benedictine novice. Better, at all costs, however, or so she had reasoned, to put twenty miles and a border between him and a hanging. Now she stood thoughtful, with the chime of the bell in her ears, and wondered. And when Cadfael came slowly back to her across the empty court, she stood in his way great-eyed, fronting him gravely as if she would penetrate into the most remote recesses of his mind.
“You do not believe it of him, either,” she said with certainty. “You know he never harmed this poor shepherd lad. Would you really have stood by and let him go free?”
“If he had so chosen,” said Cadfael, “yes. But I knew he would not. The choice was his. He made it. And now I am going to Compline.”
“I’ll wait in your workshop,” said Daalny. “I must talk to you. Now that I’m sure, now I will tell you everything I know. Even if none of it is proof of anything, yet you may see something there that I have not seen. He has need of more wits than mine, and two who will stand by him is better than one.”
“I wonder, now,” said Cadfael, studying her thin, bright, resolute face, “whether you would be wanting that young man for yourself, or is this pure disinterested kindness?” She looked at him, and slowly smiled. “Well, I’ll come,” he said. “I need a second wit, too. If it’s cold within, you may use the bellows on my brazier. I have turfs enough there to damp it down again before we leave it.”
In the close, timber-scented air of the hut, with the herbs rustling overhead in the rising warmth from the brazier, she sat leaning forward to the glow, the light gilding her high cheekbones and the broad sweep of brow beneath the curling black hair.
“You know now,” she said, “that he was not sent for to Longner that night. It was a tale that could be believed, but what he wanted was to have a reason to be somewhere else, not to be here when the shepherd came. That would not have been the end of it, but it would have put off the worst, and Tutilo seldom looks beyond the day. If he could have evaded meeting the poor man for even a few days, this squabble over the saint’s bones would have been settled, one way or another, and Herluin would have been off on his travels, and taken Tutilo with him. Not that that promises him much of a life,” she added, jutting a doubtful lip, “now he’s getting over his saintliness. If the biblical fates go against him, Herluin will take all the vexation and shame out on Tutilo, with usury. You know it as well as I do. These monastics, they are what they are born, only with a vengeance. If they come into the world hard and cold, they end harder and colder, if they come generous and sweet, they grow ever sweeter and more generous. All one or all the other. And just when Tutilo is beginning to wake up to where he belongs, and what he has it in him to be,” she said vehemently. “Well, so it was. He lied about Longner to be out of here all the evening long. Now he owes her a debt, and goes to pay it.”